


MUGGLEBORN

by unknowableroom_archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-10-10
Updated: 2007-11-03
Packaged: 2019-01-19 21:31:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 3,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12418566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unknowableroom_archivist/pseuds/unknowableroom_archivist
Summary: Some of the greatest witches of all time, some of the strangest wizards.  The ones who bring change: who see house elves in horror and scream “Red card!”� at Quidditch matches.  The ones who leave everything behind as children.  The ones who demand that the magical world meet the standards of their personal Neverlands, and the ones ...





	1. M udblooded freak

**Author's Note:**

> Note from ChristyCorr, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Unknowable Room](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Unknowable_Room), a Harry Potter archive active from 2005-2016. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after May 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Unknowable Room collection profile](http://www.archiveofourown.org/collections/unknowableroom).

Freak.

That’s what the magical world cost me.  Petunia and her epithet.  Freak, she called me.  No longer Lily, Lils, little sister.  Freak.

How is it that only with that word did I realize how often I had chosen you over her?  How often I had defended a boy who was horrible to her and walked further and further away from being her little sister?  From the moment you told me I was a witch, you cost me my sister.  You struck out at her, and I didn’t save her.

Before, it belonged to me and Tuney.  It was a game; it was our secret; it was what I used to annoy her.  Now it belongs to me and you and to her it’s just my abnormality, not a secret or a mystery.  She’ll never defend me when I do something strange or cover for me, ever again.  She’ll shun me and my freakish ways.

For so long I tried to pretend that it was worth it – all of Hogwarts Castle and my friends and you and magic.  Most of the time it was, if anything can ever be worth the cost of your sister.

But in the end, I couldn’t help thinking that the only thing you really offered me in consolation for pinning me as a freak to Petunia was an epithet of your own.  That word was what I got for choosing you, and for all that I gave up to do it.

That was my reward, my consolation prize:

Mudblood.


	2. U ntroubled parents

Dean had been on the verge, several times during that long summer, of telling his parents what had happened at the end of the school year.  Sometimes, when he woke with a start in the night, he wanted to wake them and tell them he had seen a dead boy – a dead student – at the end of the last term.  He wanted to tell them that the kid had been murdered, and a boy in his dorm had fought a madman to bring the body back to Hogwarts.

But then he remembers the letters he has received from Seamus about his mother’s reaction…It would be worse with his parents.  He could not even begin to guess if they would side with Dumbledore or the Ministry or if it would make a difference.

Their ignorance is a relief, and it means an easy return, a smiling send off among a worried throng on a platform almost palpable with suspicion.  A glib answer to give after a fight in the dormitory.  No one for Umbridge to punish for his involvement in the D.A.  No trouble, no mess, no fuss, no pestering overprotective parents.

No comfort in the dead of night when he wakes from a dream in which he sees that it is his own body that Harry has dragged back to Hogwarts.


	3. G irl I'm gonna marry

Andromeda can’t help it, Ted Tonks had to tell himself repeatedly during that long, almost torturous dinner with his parents.  It wasn’t like she was doing anything nasty or condescending.  She just radiated the difference Ted had always pretended didn’t exist between his worlds.

Of course, Andromeda and her family were as highbrow as you could get.  She couldn’t help it that she had been talking of Quidditch matches and Transfiguration theories and Arithmancy discoveries all of her life and didn’t know how to turn it off.  She couldn’t help it if her manners led her to eat her fried chicken with a fork and knife rather than her hands.

Ted had always reverted back to his Muggle self when he came home, but he couldn’t do that with Andromeda in tow.  He could not imagine giving up what she had given up for him, but he felt as if he had left his family far behind from the moment that he entered his parents’ house with this woman, who could not stop being a witch for a second.

“And when will we be meeting your parents?” his mother asked Andromeda.

“They’re gone,” she said without hesitation.

“I’m so sorry, you poor dear.”

Would his parents be that disposable in his new family?  No, but they would not know the truth about his life or his wife.  They could never understand her, so they could never understand his life with her.  It hadn’t mattered before – it was as if he were an astrophysicist whose job his humanities-centered parents couldn’t grasp in detail.  But his wife, his chosen partner, might as well have been an alien creature.

So Ted Tonks and his parents would never again live in the same world.


	4. G irl on the doorstep

Hermione had waited longer than she meant to before coming to Australia for her parents.  She was afraid, of facing them after everything she had been through, and of restoring the memory of when she had put a wand up to their foreheads and taken away their lives.

But when Mrs. Wilkins opens the door Hermione knew that, for all the time she dallied, she was not ready.

She had prepared herself for their rage at her actions, their betrayal, their agony at the thought of living their lives oblivious to her, and their inability to understand her actions.  She who had been their whole world had sent them to live on the other side of the globe.  Could they ever truly forgive her?

She had prepared herself for their inability to deal with their dramatically changed daughter, who could no longer be fully trusted and had cut them out of her life, whether for their own good or not.  She was prepared for their despair that she had lived her life without them, without needing them.

There would be fear of her now as well, but she was prepared.

She was not prepared for the look of polite, mild interest on her mother’s face as she regarded the girl on her doorstep, wondering if she were selling cookies or magazines or taking donations for a charity.  Hermione is in no way ready for the moment when she is no more than a girl who showed up on the Wilkinses doorstep and burst into tears.

She had prepared herself for the moment when her parents realized that they had been nothing in her life, but nothing could have prepared her for when she would be nothing in their eyes.


	5. L ens of a camera

Every week, he sends them the film, then later the moving pictures.  Every week, regular as clockwork, until the school barn owl floats down to him the moment he enters the Owlery.  The _Owlery_ , imagine, Dennis!

At first he writes long descriptions of everything, details of the rules of Quidditch and classes until he thinks Dennis will probably be the best prepared first year of the lot.  If he comes.  Just think when we’re here together, little bro!

Then descriptions on the backs of the photographs and hasty letters, always more  and more brief.  He censors himself from his brother, because Dennis is too young to know about a monster targeting people like his brother.  It’s amazing all the problems that magic can solve, Den.

But it’s only a cat…only a rumor…

It’s as if he realized that his family could never understand from just what he said, just what he wrote and told them, no matter how long his letters, no matter how many instruction manuals he writes for his brother.  If his brother isn’t a wizard too, none of the letters will matter.  So he sends picture after picture, mimicking the personalities he meets, the movement that he sees, the world in which he studies.  And he hopes, deep down, that in the pictures they will see what he does not want to tell them, what he cannot write for them.  He hopes they’ll see the danger flitting about the edges of the photographs.  Can you imagine, Dennis?

He takes picture after picture so that they just might be able to understand.  I snuck out tonight, Dennis, I’m going to bring some biscuits to Harry Potter who got hurt in the Quidditch match, some of those pictures are really disgusting but the corridors look really cool at night…

The film goes up in smoke, as if it were all the things he didn’t dare tell them about the magical world.  It seems that, at last, they will know.  The exploding film will tell them everything he, and the pictures he sent, couldn’t.


	6. E x-girlfriend, ex-witch

“Whizzby, lead Miss Clearwater down to level nine,” the leering man said, waving his hand dismissively.

Percy moves to take her arm, and she jerks away violently, barely registering the fact that he moved as if to escort her, rather than arrest her.  In the elevator, they both stare straight ahead.  “I suppose you were right, Perce,” she said in clipped tones.  “Our relationship would have seriously compromised your career with the Ministry.”  The irony holds all of the fury and disgust she feels toward him at this moment.

All those times, sneaking around to meet in deserted corridors in the dungeons, she had imagined he was fearless – to be out with a Muggleborn with the heir and monster of Slytherin rampaging through the school.  She had thought he would always stand by her, no matter what.  She had learned, just out of Hogwarts, that that was not to be case.  She was nothing more to an ambitious pureblood than an embarrassing entanglement.

Now the Heir of Slytherin and his monsters had exploded into the world, and she was once again descending into the dungeons with the boy she had thought would stand with her against them.  She was not a giggling schoolgirl hiding behind a mirror now; she would stand proud and dare them to declare her a thief of magic.  Perhaps she would yet again survive.

But, “I never thought you would be my Basilisk, Percy Weasley.”


	7. B athrooms never change

It sounds stupid, and every person she had ever told had laughed at her for it, but Myrtle had been terrified of using the toilet for the first time in the magical world.  Everything was so new and strange, and little thing from the clothes to entering the platform to the appearance of food on the House tables was like some big secret that purebloods and halfbloods took for granted.  Who knew what kind of odd things the toilet would do in a world where you walked through walls, food materialized from thin air and a hat could solve your identity crisis?

Even other Muggleborns laughed, because what could be magical about a toilet stall?

To Myrtle, the magic was that there wasn’t any.  Loos were always the same.  At Hogwarts or at home or in the shops in Diagon Alley, it was always the same kind of room.  It had stalls you entered by opening the door, toilets that flushed when you pulled a rope or pushed a lever, sinks with regular taps to summon water, and no surprises.  Everyone thought it was so funny – that she would think about bathroom similarities and that she found it so comforting.

But when the attacks started, the bathrooms were a place where she felt safe. Other Muggleborns would have envied such a spot.  It was where she ran to when she was being teased, and it was the place where she didn’t check over her shoulder constantly as if about to see a monster round the corner.

That was why she didn’t check when she was coming out of the stall, despite the suspicious presence of a boy and the whisper of a strange password.  Anywhere else, she would have suspected the Heir of Slytherin at once.

It’s odd that she didn’t feel betrayed by the bathroom that held such danger after so many years of lulling her into complacency.  The truth is that she was too busy being relieved that, even on the other side of death, the bathroom was the same and offered her the same comfort.  Even death could not render a bathroom something different and strange.

There wasn’t much else that death and magic left untouched.


	8. O nly safe in isolation

They couldn’t fix Ariana.  Magic couldn’t fix the damage that those _wretched_ Muggle boys had caused.  A hard, cold fury settled in her stomach, and Kendra Dumbledore was certain that someday it would explode the way that Ariana’s repressed magic did.  One day her resentment would shoot out and destroy something.  Kendra knew that her resentment was poisoning her, poisoning her family.

But she could not expunge it.  She had come to the magical world like any other Muggleborn convinced that magic could solve all of the world’s problems.  In fact, she had spent much of her life campaigning furiously against the International Statute of Secrecy, denying Muggles the right to magical health care and protection that they rightly deserved – that could solve their problems.

Apparently not all of their problems.  Apparently not her wounded daughter who had been so abused by horrible little boys who couldn’t bear the thought of a world beyond their own and destroyed her for it.  Magic could not stop her sweet, beautiful daughter from suddenly turning strange and dangerous at moments…

Percival had refused to say why he had killed those boys, because the Ministry would have locked her up.  She would have threatened their International Statute of Secrecy, especially with a mother who had spent her life trying to overthrow it.

But Kendra understood, now, why wizards kept their secrets.  The days of witchburning were long ago, but they were not so very far away.  She understood why she could not save Muggles with magical medicine or teach them how to protect themselves from the deadly creatures that they did not believe in.  Because they would do _this_ to her sons as well, because they could take away her daughter and her husband.  Muggles weren’t the helpless creatures who needed protection.

They were dangerous when mixed with wizards, terrifying when confronted by something that they did not understand.  Just what they had all been trying to tell her.  Just what a Muggleborn, delighted by Hogwarts and magical possibilities, was so ill-equipped to understand.


	9. R egistration Commission's Report on Dirk Cresswell

Dirk Cresswell hadn’t liked it, fudging his family tree and pretending to be a halfblood to satisfy the half-mad bigots.  He would much rather have stood up to them and proved that whatever they thought of Muggleborns, there was at least one who could outduel them every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

But he was a family man.  His wife and children needed him there, not dead having finally been overwhelmed by sheer numbers of Death Eaters or in Azkaban under arrest.

And he really was furious when Runcorn blew his cover, because he knew that his sons would never stand for this.  It was to his everlasting shame that Dirk had stood for the Registration Commission being formed in the first place, but he was a family man and his position at the Ministry allowed him to help the War effort even as he wondered which side the rest of the Ministry was on.

His boys were too young to face down a man like Runcorn, backed as he was by a legion of Death Eaters controlled by a madman.  More than anything else, he escaped from his escort to Azkaban to prevent them from dying to avenge him.

Dirk hated that he was always putting his family in danger.  Umbridge had said, in response to his furious demand to know his crime, that he was in trouble because of his family, but she seemed to have it backwards.  In the first war, it had been his parents who were put at risk by his involvement.  Now his sons would lose their heads at his imprisonment, and their outrage would make them stupid.  Parents were meant to protect children.  This second war was worse.

But there was one silver lining at least: he got his chance to let them register him as a Mudblood then prove to them all that he was ten times the wizard that they were.  And they had had to put it on record, file it in triplicate, and send out the memos: _Dirk Cresswell, registered Mudblood, defeated his escort of five purebloods and escaped custody.  Is believed to be in hiding._

Not anymore.


	10. N ot an Eton boy

A/N: Not quite the end, but it might be a little while in coming.  Projects due in the imminent future.  


\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Justin Finch-Fletchley was nearly an Eton boy. That really would have been something. The Prince of Wales and his brother were there at the time he would attended – he would have gone to Eton with the future King of England, and probably at least one of the Prime Ministers. He could have _been_ a Prime Minister, or a member of the Cabinet at least. Eton was the place where the boys who would change the country and the world grew up and made their contacts, tested themselves against each other for the first time.

Didn’t they say, “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton”?

Other members of his house found him overly friendly – always making contacts like he would have done at Eton. Harry Potter, Guilderoy Lockhart…the new noteworthies he was courting. Rubbing shoulders with the most famous names…who would go on to do great things…

But Lockhart is an idiot and a liar, and Harry Potter might have tried to kill him. Ancient grudges were being played out on the Quidditch pitch and in the halls of Hogwarts, a debate that went back as far as the school itself was using him and Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley of all people to settle the score.

Eton would have been the place where it was still safe to lose the battles, where future ones were previewed. Hogwarts is life and death from the very beginning, with no chance to learn in a risk-free environment, and the battles are being fought by the heirs of ancient founders. Eton is engrossed in the future, and Hogwarts stymied in the past.

His chosen school does not offer him the prestige, the safety, or the promise of Eton. It offers him the ignoble title of Mudblood, the yellow petrifying eyes of a Basilisk, and the threat of a deadly cycle which no one can stop.

He could have been an ordinary Finch-Fletchley Eton boy playing polo with the Prince of Wales. Instead he is lying on a hospital bed unable to move so much as an eyelash, just another Mudblood caught in the eyes of the Heir of Slytherin. It seems a bad bargain for being able to turn a match into a needle with a wooden stick.


	11. S illy reasons in an impossible situation

Some Muggleborns registered because they thought the Ministry wanted a way of keeping track in order to protect them.  They were idiots.  Some Muggleborns registered out of fear, hoping they would be left until last.  They were cowardly idiots.  Some refused to register on principle.  They were Gryffindors.  Some registered in order to spite them, stand proud by their heritage.  They were brave idiots.  Some registered because they thought that even so they might be safe, their connections or standing with the Ministry would save them.  They were Slughorn’s pet idiots.

Mary Cattermole registered because of Lily Evans.  Lily had stood defiantly, publicly, spectacularly against the Dark Lord as a proud Muggleborn from the very beginning, when Mary MacDonald had been busy getting married and having children.  Lily had done that too, of course, and it hadn’t stopped her from fighting.  Mary remembered her old friend’s idiotic but magnificent defiance.

_Parents:_

It would change everything:

_“greengrocers.”_

She couldn’t do much more, because she was a mother of three.  She couldn’t do less because they were the best parents she could have asked for, and she would not pretend that they did not belong to her.

It’s twenty years too late, Lily, but it is what you wanted of me.  That I become a silly, defiant woman as you were a silly, defiant girl.

At the last moment, when Mary thinks that her sacrifice will not even save her children as her friend’s did, Lily Evans’s son bursts into the courtroom and sets her free.  Mary Cattermole liked to think that it was his mother’s forgiveness that made it her trial that he disrupted.  It’s certainly something his mother would have done.


	12. ' S okay, you didn't know...

The Creevy uncles had a hard time remembering that their nephews were wizards.  They also had a lot of opinions, and one every year seemed to be accidentally aimed at little Dennis.  He always had to smooth things over before the reunion could continue with (nearly) everyone on pleasant terms.  He always had to find a way to make everything okay.

1993:

“Damn fortunetelling swindlers…sorry, Dennis, I suppose…”

“ ‘S okay, Uncle Brady, Collin says Divination actually is more than a little ridiculous…”

1996:

“Bunch of useless riffraff sitting around as if all of life’s luxuries will magically appear…sorry, boys.”

“ ‘S okay, Uncle Alby, but you do know wizards have to work hard too, right?”

1997:

“Let ‘em fight their own battles, is what I say!  We don’t want no part of wars that aren’t any of our concern!  Can solve their own problems…sorry, Dennis, I know you lot are in some Dumblebore’s army…”

“ ‘S okay, Uncle Evan, it is our fight.  We’re proud to stand up for what’s important.  And this is a different kind of war than you mean.”

1999:

“I just mean is all of this what Collin really would have wanted…I am sorry, Dennis.”

“ ‘S okay, Uncle Finn, I want him remembered.  And I really think it is.”

2003:

“I mean, terrorism isn’t so easy a line: for example, these blokes really believed in all of their rhetoric – can they really be blamed for taking it to an extreme…theoretically…Dennis, you’re goin’ all red, I didn’t mean the people who – Collin – I…”

He took several deep breaths.

“ ‘S okay, Uncle Gilroy, I know you didn’t.  But they’re not all that different, you know, than the purebloods who discriminated against him.”

2006:

“All I’m saying is that dying in battle is certainly a glorious goal…Dennis, I…”

There was a long pause before he smoothed this over.

“ ‘S okay, Uncle Hebert, you don’t know.  You weren’t there.  You don’t understand.  You couldn’t.  So it’s okay.”

“I do wish we could understand, Dennis.”

“ ‘S okay if you can’t.  Collin would have.”


	13. COMPENSATION

**Compensation**

 

Three bricks up, two across, tap with a stick of wood…

The bricks start to shift, moving aside and forming themselves into an archway, and suddenly a street is visible on the other side, a street you never would have suspected was there.

You’ve always been strange, done things you can’t explain, always felt different and fearful.  You never imagined that _this_ was what waited for the kid who turned mean old Mrs. White’s shoes into _real_ alligator…

A white marble building looms over the alley in the distance, and shops line the streets: apothecaries, broomstick shops, bookstores, magical creatures, robes and pointed hats…it’s all real.

Magic.

Soon you’ll meet your first goblin, change your money into gold and silver and bronze, buy wizarding robes and spellbooks, and see the insides of a magical pet store.

Soon you’ll hold a magic wand for the first time and feel a rush  of warmth to your finger tips, perform your first conscious magic as sparks shoot out of it in its celebration at finding its master.

Welcome to Diagon Alley…all those dreams, all that magic, all those things you thought you would have to leave behind with childhood, are _real._

There is no other moment, in either world, to equal it.


End file.
